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@Vamp898@social.tchncs.de Thats a common fallacy, you absolutely can.
If it is not known whether some assertion is a fact or not to a group of people, then people hold opinions as to what is the fact and what is not.
So in short determining what is or is not a fact is an opinion.
In this case we are dealing with something a bit unique though. In 2000 pluto absolutely was a planet, because the definition of planet was choosen in such a way to be inclusive of pluto. Some group decided to redefine that word, which is fine, but it doesnt change anything in the physical world.
Yea, they obviously teach the current consensus towards a definition, which was redefined. Nothing wrong with that but its important to realize we are dealing with a question about semantics, not fact or objective truth. What we call things, as with all language, comes down to usage.
@Vamp898@social.tchncs.de
@freemo @null0x0 @Vamp898 That consensus redefinition process in this case though is the process we call The Scientific Method. Science is trying to push the language in ways that better model the truth. It is intended to be controversial because it opens avenues of scientific inquiry: if this object is different enough for a new classification, what makes it different?
We learn and we understand more of the universe. (It wasn’t a “demotion”.)
Well no its not. Science is not anyting that involves consensus, that is just democracy. They are defining a word here, and not based off any discovery or anything we learned experimentally.
We redefined the word because we liked the new definition better, because it felt more "useful" to us. That isnt science, nothing about that has much to do with science really, its just linguistics.
What is unique here is they decided to appropriate an existing word, and redefine it to mean something similar but new. Usually when we need new vocabulary words in science for convenience we dont redefine words already in common usage (particularly among non-scientists). We create new ones.
But yea, in the end, this wasnt really a scientific process in any meaningful way.
@null0x0 @Vamp898@social.tchncs.de
@freemo @null0x0 @Vamp898 Peer review, meetings, conferences, (Democratic) societies. Science is absolutely a consensus building process (and why Enlightenment values claim science and democracy must work hand in hand in both directions).
It was a group decision based on decades of new observations as telescopes became more powerful. It was decided with years of debate and consensus building among several societies of peers based on mounting evidence.
It was science.
Not all consensus is science, all good science involves consensus.
This was not science it was consensus, the fact that science does involve consensus is irrelevant to that.
This was us deciding what we wanted the definition of a word to be, again, that has nothing to do with science.
We didnt discover or learn anything new about planets that resulted in this change. We made the change for no other reason then we liked the new definition better.
Again that isnt science.
You seem to be under the impression we learned something new about pluto and then from that determined it wasnt a planet.. No thats not what happened at all. We knew for a VERY long time about plutos orbit and its nature.
We changed a definition of a word, thats it, nothing was discovered that caused the change.
I think you dont understand why or what happened that caused planet to be redefined...
@null0x0 @Vamp898@social.tchncs.de
@freemo @null0x0 @Vamp898 You are right we didn’t learn new things about Pluto, science had long debated it wasn’t a planet and had argued it should be excluded for as long as it was included. What we did learn was about a lot of other objects where Pluto was a better fit among newly discovered peers than as an exception to the many rules of being a planet. There’s upwards of 10+ “dwarf planets”. They refined the definition with new information.
@freemo @null0x0 @Vamp898
Scientific consensus does exactly this all the time though. Finding exceptions that don’t fit the rules and better redefining the original classification by making it clearer why the exceptions should be excluded.
Look at the splits in Biological Classification over the decades. From Linnaeus’ Two Kingdoms to the modern 7 (and two “empires”).
You can argue the difference is (pseudo-)Latin versus Ancient Greek, but the redefinition work is the same science process.